


shaped by the clearest blue

by stepofthewind



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-24 01:27:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21329983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepofthewind/pseuds/stepofthewind
Summary: A reiteration of the death of Grace.
Relationships: Grace & Dani Ramos
Comments: 10
Kudos: 119





	shaped by the clearest blue

**Author's Note:**

> oh, i'm sad. i'm so, so, so sad. after dreaming up a scheme in this [prose review](https://boxd.it/Rlsfn) i did of dark fate, i really wanted to expand on it by doing an intensive character study on grace. nobody ever asks for non-fix-it fics, so if you're really here to read this, i'm proud of you. the title of this comes from the song "clearest blue" by chvrches.
> 
> my twitter is [@sanjuniperogf](https://twitter.com/sanjuniperogf), if you'd like to chat.

They bury her body, at Dani’s insistence.

Sarah almost denies her the chance, scared of the scant possibility of the Rev-9 somehow raising himself from the dead. Seconds after she returns the “You saved me…” to Grace in earnest, though, Dani starts to feel something rack at her chest, imperceptible only until it boils in her enough to release itself in the form of a ragged sob. She breaks under the burden of another death, simultaneously leaning into Sarah’s side for support and greedily reaching towards Grace’s head for proof. The evidence is already there, but it takes the physicality, the cradling of her head in her hands to confront the truth.

Sacrifice is so ingrained in this specific casualty that it wreaks havoc on Dani in a way that it hasn’t already before. Lucky enough to be absent from the spaces where her father and brother died, she continues to mourn them from a distance. With them, there is still a stunted idea of disbelief. She hasn’t seen their bodies; she hasn’t gazed into their glazed eyes. Her _ papi _ couldn’t possibly be dead at the doorstep of their cozied abode, Taco either barking beratingly at him or staying lifeless and soundless alongside him. Diego might have made it out of the charred carcass of the truck he had taken over driving, not dealing with death but the bar burrowed into his stomach instead. This instance shouldn’t be so different, but that much is certainly a lie. Now that she has to see for herself the damage dealt, rather than regretfully leave it to decay, Dani isn’t sure how to stomach it.

“She doesn’t have anybody,” Dani whispers, the clarity of her own voice the sole thing holding her back from hurling. “She doesn’t have anybody but us, Sarah.” She sniffles, reluctantly lifting a hand away from where it combs through Grace’s cropped hair and scrubbing away at the tears attempting to collect in the dirtied grooves of her face. Suddenly, there is a sense of urgency about her as she turns to Sarah, confronting her with a sobering look that conveys only a sliver of what she is feeling.

_ “Please.” _

The older woman’s heart aches for her, a strange reoccurrence after spending too long exercising that part of herself out. Sarah delicately recalls a scene with Grace amidst all this chaos, before they crossed the border, but after they ditched a car to the shadows. Caring about Dani was an effect of having been her once, she’d told her. While their stories were not exact, there was at least one similarity between them. They were both mothers: Sarah having birthed a son, Dani having birthed a resistance.

Thus, Sarah forces herself to listen to the aftermath of the room. The air has truly settled now, she can already tell, no longer contaminated by the unrealized presence of a reforming Terminator.

She has no choice in her relenting. The cops could be around soon, but Sarah would be sure that they avoided them on their way out.

Sometime during their grueling undertaking, Dani has a thought daunt her.

_ What does the end of the world look like to the woman who has already seen it once before? _

* * *

_ It looks a lot like the dust of Mexico City. _

Lying in it; hunched over in it. Grace unconsciously starts to acclimate to this past of twenty-two years with eyes closed and breathing bated. The silence of the old world is comforting, a stark contrast to the constant noise of the same twenty-two years in advance. She is alone in it initially. Then, someone touches her neck, and she can’t help but gasp at the contact. Save for two voices sharing a language she does not know, two bodies crowding around her to unsurely aid her up and away, two people struggling under her weight as they help her from the site of her landing, Grace is able to get drunk on the stillness of the city.

She is abandoned shortly after this, though. Lying in the dust; hunched over in the dust. While dimly aware of the droning sirens and the mumbles from more voices, Grace is still addled by the transition, a stranger straight out of 2042.

Despite the dusk that cloaks her, there is a light that shines through it out of nowhere, too stark against the general dark. Naturally, Grace raises a hand to shield her sight from its source, fingers spread thinly so as to filter in the fluorescence of a flashlight.

“Vamos.” The most coherent word she has heard in minutes.

The harsh grasp on her wrist is a shock to Grace’s senses, and it is as if she has been activated, switched on at last. Her eyes are open now, blown out and blue, and she finds herself focused on the silhouette of a gun set in a strap, augmentation revealing it immediately. Aware of her surroundings, her newfound abilities are all she has against whom she has come to identify as a squad of police officers. Each are obviously of the same caliber. Otherwise, there would have actually been worthy opposition amongst them.

Within a breath, Grace has beaten the first to the ground with his own baton, sent the second careening over one of the police cars, somersaulted the third unceremoniously into the hood of another, and countered the fourth with a quick set of successive punches. What could have been invigorating reads like a chore. Grace guesses the reason why she thinks so is because of how tame it is in comparison to what she has already been through before, a war no longer raging on if her mission is completed.

Her mission, her mission, her mission. Dani.

A man and a woman are who Grace leaves in the wake of her first fight, the latter skirting her line of vision to connect back with the former. Assuming these are the two that stumbled her to her feet just moments before, she briefly thinks to thank them.

She is beaten to it. “Thanks, lady,” says the man warily. The woman clutches him close, her arm around him, his arm around her. “You just saved our asses.”

Oh, Grace has done far from that. She makes sure to tell him as much as she lifts his clothes and his car off his person and takes back off into that dusk that cloaks her, reveling in the crackle of radio that comes to life with the turn of a key. This could be another night on another drive down another road if the image is captured perfectly, but she’d never known what that was like in the first place. Too young to have had nights on drives down roads in the driver's seat of her own timeline, it’s a thought straying from the mindset she should really have.

Her mission. _ Dani. _ Time to change the clock on Judgement Day and destiny itself.

* * *

_ It looks a lot like the shimmer of a stretch of highway. _

Grace is burning, burning, burning. Back in daylight. Back in the confines of a stolen car. Back in the scalding heat of herself and the landscape.

“Dani… I need some water…” Grace remembers saying, sooner better than later. Her name sounds nice on her tongue. An idle thought, yes, but it’s not often that it can be said and gotten away with, shot down with the strict reminder of Dani’s position as the commander. “We can… maybe look in the back…” she continues. One hand of hers is white-knuckled at the steering wheel, while the other hand drifts behind her to the back of the vehicle, searching for a bottle or a jug. Her fingers rifle through unzipped bags and dance across the sides of gun after gun. Nothing in terms of sustenance, though. _ Nothing. _

Gasps have started to come out of her in excess, filling the spaces of her sentences as if she were unintentionally punctuating each and every word spoken. Grace feels like she’s running a fever, her temperature at a all-time high. Her emphasis on her humanity isn’t out of exaggerated defense. It works the way any other part of her does: as a strength, as a weakness. She’s worn out. That’s the difference in an augment and a Rev-9. Terminators never tire. Terminators never rest. Terminators never stop. They may experience setbacks, but those are mere impediments to the inevitable. If one tries for an intake of breath for far too long, they might as well end up making it their last.

All Grace can think about is how parched she is. Dry throat; dry air. It isn’t the most ideal combination, so it’s not surprising to see that it has thus taken a toll on her.

There is a short spark of interchange that occurs between her and Dani as she scrabbles for consciousness. Blinking back the bright spots that flit across her vision like flies and gulping in the breeze that the open window brings in, Grace argues with her terrified tone. Unable to remember it now, the conversation having been broken up by her consistent blackouts, there are echoes of Dani’s innocent cries in the dark as a little of her adrenaline starts to drain, too.

“I wanna go home.” That’s what Dani starts with. “Take me home.”

_ She sounds so young, _ Grace thinks. “We’re not doing that,” she says instead.

“I have to tell my father about Diego.” Her brother. Grace had never gotten to meet him in any timeline.

“It’s not possible.” Grace is shaking her head, resolute in her answer.

“He doesn’t know about Diego — ! I need to see my father — !”

“Your father is dead!”

Her shouts are recognizable, Dani’s, tired and higher, but they aren’t laced with their usual suspects of curses. Grace can only guess that she’ll get them from someone, somewhere, down the line of whatever time they’re living in now.

“What?” Defeat is at the edge of the word, and it is accompanied by the whimper of the “No…” that succeeds it, after Grace manages to rattle off one of the Rev-9’s many menacing capabilities. There rings the truth of Dani’s distant state away from that fact once more, that fact of death reeking on her only real family, but Grace doesn’t need her to believe her. She just needs her to listen, and it seems as though Dani has caught on to that, her presence so silent in the passenger seat that it is enough to lull Grace into something dangerous.

Drifting, drifting, drifting. Her gasps are getting stronger, swallowing down nothing but heat.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Dani sounds above water, Grace down below, drowning in all that blue. Her voice is enough to rush Grace to the surface for a second, though, acting as an anchor into focus. “I’m crashing,” she recalls explaining to her as best she can, unsure of a much better term to use to describe it. Shutting down doesn’t seem to make any sense, as there is always a sort of restart shortly after. Anything even remotely violent isn’t a correct equivalent either. She settles with crashing only because she can’t bear to think about it a moment longer, and this is when Dani carefully reaches out to touch her arm.

“You’re burning up.”

Everything condenses itself into this singular action. Dani’s intention is to check Grace, but there is confusion in the gesture, as if trying to understand her as she grips at her. _ This is real, _ Grace thinks, in reference to the chase and the Rev-9 and the stakes claimed. _ And this, _ small palm on hot skin. The lines are familiar. Not the white ones that seal her numerous surgeries, but the ones in her thoughts, almost scripted. They sound like they’re from someone living a life far from the one she lives, drastically different yet still rooted in technology. It seems inescapable for her, the concept of machines.

Grace launches herself into a tangent then, reciting the drawbacks of her augmentation as if she were reading an instruction manual. It’s a distraction from going unconscious, but it’s starting to creep up on her, and all she can do is anticipate it at an excruciating pace. Dani doesn’t seem to be catching on this time, her head shaking in Grace’s peripheral, rejecting the information being given to her. Grace can’t blame her for not wanting any part in this. She’ll continue to think that as time goes on, surely.

“I need… I need meds…”

It comes too soon. God, she can’t help it. With a final, forced heave of her chest, Grace sinks back to the bottom, slumping over.

She despises how easily she crashes, but there comes a scarily calming sensation with it, pervading her system every time it happens. It settles into her stiff spine and it takes her heavy arms down with it. Her limbs lie comfortably at her sides now, strung to simple laws of gravity. While the seat of the car stings where her skin is exposed by her tank top, Grace has never felt better. When was the last time she had slept on something that wasn’t either a standard military cot or a makeshift bed? The question sounds selfish, but she’s sure she can afford to think like this while in such a state.

Briefly, Grace thinks of 2042. Bunks side by side in a private place. A sleeping shape of someone under blankets scavenged from the fray. Breathing in, breathing out, before waking and sensing a presence gone by way of warmth.

_ “Grace?” _ It’s Dani. Searching for her in those sheets.

The car crosses the yellow lines.

“Grace!” _ It’s Dani. _ Shaking her awake from her stupor.

* * *

_ It looks a lot like other things: the night falling from the top of a train, the blinding light on the border between one country and the other, the stars from the pilot seat of a plane. _

* * *

Dani shouldn’t ever have to see the end of the world. At the rate they’re going, that is little reassurance, its salve just soothing enough to get her to sleep for a few hours at a time. Still, everyone is sure she will survive this. She hears story upon story of this harrowing Judgement Day from Grace, this version of it that only known by her and no one but her. Not Sarah. Not Carl. It isn’t Skynet in Grace’s time. It’s Legion. All the terminology is a mess, not making much more sense to Dani, if anything already does, contributing to the chaos that is, well, _ this. _ This life she has now. T-800s, Rev-9s, augments. Were there even translations for these sorts of things? Dani decides not to think too hard on that.

“Hey.”

She comes to, remembering where she is. The sun is setting outside the window she’s been staring through, but the sky isn’t too pretty, not pinking the way it usually should around this time of year. It’s as if even nature is at an impasse until they finish this. Again, whatever _ this _ is. They’ve since crowded into Carl’s van, the four of them, on their way to meet up with a contact of Sarah’s. They carry with them a poor plan that’s perfect in the moment and a whole slew of weaponry that still won’t be enough. Carl is driving, of course, but Sarah reluctantly takes shotgun, sleeping noisily. Back at the house, she had huffed about it, clambering on in, annoyed at the idea of having to sit next to a Terminator, yet no one had insisted on her doing it.

If anything, there’s plenty of space in the back.

The middle seat is unoccupied, Dani and Grace having gravitated to their respective windows. The former has been staring off in reverie, but at the sound of the other, soft to keep the conversation to themselves, she snaps out of it, hoping she isn’t regarding her with an indifferent look. There isn’t a lot of energy in these gaps, after all.

“Hey,” Dani sighs out.

“How are you holding up?”

Grace looks crammed up with the chairs, the very chairs that afford Dani all the leg room she wants. Her head is against the glass, and she seems insistent on leaving it there, thus angling herself a certain way so that she can see Dani while they talk.

“I’m holding up.” Dani can’t muster up the courage of a longer answer. A nod of understanding is what Grace gives her regardless. They’ve both been effectively worn out by the past couple of days, and it shows in the way that they speak, in the way that they slouch, in the way that they succumb, to exhaustion and an inexorable amount of other things. To each other, maybe. “How about you?” she asks back. “How are you holding up?”

“Same as you,” Grace replies with a shrug. _ Barely. _

Considering how stilted this conversation is already, Dani isn’t sure why Grace initiated it in the first place. If someone gets her going, then she keeps going.

“How much longer can we go on like this?” Might as well cut the bullshit with the small talk. Dani’s started to pick up the little pieces of who she’s supposed to become, knowing that placing aside what’s on their minds isn’t how this relationship works, whether now and in 2042.

“As long as we have to.” A determination is deep set in Grace’s reply, almost as if it were her default setting. Dani can read between the lines, though. _ As long as _ I _ have to. _

“And what happens after?”

She notices Grace bite her lip then, tucking the bottom into a corner of teeth. Her hesitation to speak lingers in the air loudly, as if her thoughts are being broadcast and Dani should be able to hear them if she put her ears close and listened hard enough. Maybe there is a beat there, but all that is heard are Sarah’s snores, drifting from the front of the van. Besides that, unsubtle silence. Driving down back roads doesn’t do much in terms of reception for the radio, and none of them cared enough to ask Carl about his taste in music, turning to CDs. They _ were _ in Texas. Country was far from ideal for all parties.

“Grace?” Dani nudges after a good minute of waiting for her patiently.

“I don’t know what happens after,” she answers abruptly, bluntly.

She does, though. She does.

Something burns at the base of her belly then. Her power source. She’s scared it’ll start to give off that threatening glow of blue, her body basking in it. Logically, she won’t, but there’s a flicker of the color in her eyes as her augmentation adjusts, her gaze shifting anyway, as if staring at her abdomen intently enough will stop it. Grace even places a hand at the center of her stomach as a last resort, clamping down on the invisible light securely. Just in case.

From Dani’s perspective, Grace’s actions can only be read with a glance, not seen for what they really are. She doesn’t understand what overcomes her, then, when she quickly reaches over to clasp a short hand around Grace’s wrist, tugging her arm towards her and away from her waist, and slide her fingers down through hers. It’s a tangle of digits that they leave in the space between them, resting on the empty seat. They calm down in each other’s grasp, Grace especially easing herself into Dani’s touch. It’s a firm grip from her until it isn’t, lightening up, flesh on flesh, human to a not quite human.

She’s missed this. Not the false safety and the pretense of a future she no longer has. She’s missed _ her, _ specifically. _ Dani. _ Her Dani.

Sarah and Grace end up switching seats later on during the drive, but that’s not what’s important right now.

They know their fates. What counts is what they make of them.

Sure, Dani will make it out of this alive. That doesn’t mean she won’t get a glimpse of the end of the world as it’s left behind, death grazing her deftly. Nobody gets to dictate what it looks like to her _ except _ her. Not even Grace.

Because that’s the thing. Dani has a response to her own question. Quite sad, really.

The end of the world is...

* * *

_ It looks a lot like the twin scars, the twin crevices, the twin chasms. _

A guttural scream rips through Grace’s body, _ literally, _ that leaves her forearms torn in a frenzied mess of machinery and sparks. It is the most animalistic cry she could ever possibly make, yet the most human instinct she could ever succumb to simultaneously. They’re all in the kill box now, and the knife of insight is slowly carving its way into Grace, a sculpture not yet complete. Sarah and Dani, _ Dani, _ can only watch on in horror as the fight is honed in on the three of them. T-800, Rev-9, augment. The shriek, carnivorous and in it of itself a riot, is still rushing out of her system, alongside the blood of a wound punctured straight through her bulletproof vest and the glittering gold that was transfused inside of her all those years forward. It leaks like ichor; she _ feels _ like a god. A fleeting, mortal one. She’s doomed to die, yet the adrenaline has her alive, heart beating out of her chest, ticking down like a timebomb to the last second she has left.

She’d taken one last look at Dani before she’d done this, head having drifted to the left to take in her small form. There is a frantic energy at the inability to aid Grace from the measured distance she’s at all about her, coming off her like an aura. That all changes when it instantly distills itself into a singular glare of meaning. Tears in her eyes, yet brows taut, fighting the urge to let them fall. Dani is the closest she’s ever come to a reflection of the commander in this instance, a replica of an aged version of herself that will never forget this moment and never let it go to waste.

Her commander. _ Her Dani. _

The chain is warm in Grace’s hands and around her one wrist. That is a detail that strikes at her curiously, a sense memory of a gun she holds always going cold, shaking as she unloads metal onto metal. 2042 had been so incessant in its desolation, bearing the reminder of the Rev-7s that caused deaths and not Rev-9s. Strange to talk about it in the past tense, the future. Not so much to her now, though. All things considered, she isn’t captive to it any longer.

When Grace realizes that this is it for her, that this is _ really _ it for her, she forces her hand so that she’s _ sure _ it’s the end. Collared like a canine, the Rev-9 is hers as she heaves everything into negation. She remembers stumbling back when its claws inevitably give way and it shoots behind her, taking Carl with it, screeches in the spinning turbine building up to a climax. She remembers stumbling forward, feeling for Carl’s arm fretfully, attempting to wrench him out before the worst.

The end is an explosion. The end is...

* * *

...Grace.

The brilliant blue that her eyes are. That is what Dani sees at the end of the world. Her essence, _ electric, _ hollowing out the spaces of two corpses until they are smoke. Dani wouldn’t have been able to tell the T-800 and the Rev-9 apart had she and Sarah not approached the ledge after hearing them both hit the bottom and seen a bar piercing through the latter’s liquified skeleton. She isn’t sure what stings more: the almost angelic image of this or the act of mercifully offing Grace’s figure with a single convulsion.

_ Not white light, _ Sarah notes.

_ Blue light, _ Dani confirms.

* * *

_ Really, though, it looks a lot like the face of Dani Ramos. _

Dani, screaming at the start of it all as a rough translation of her father dies right in front of her, face shredded by a shotgun in Grace’s possession. _ “Papi!” _ Whatever Grace has given her to perforate her stomach, she is driving it in.

Dani, relaxing as she rests her head on Grace’s lap in the bed of a pickup truck, sleeping soundly as the world attempts to catch up to her. _ Silence except for the stirring of insects in the life surrounding them. Sarah observing Grace observing Dani. _ The hole in Grace is an opening to what will save her, and she digs deeper, not wanting to.

Dani, wavering as she wildly lets herself become the lure, exhausted of being the person that costs everything and affords nothing. _ “And then, we’re gonna use _ me _ as bait.” _She had started killing her slowly then, and she is finishing it, wrenching Grace’s power source out of her, a heart in her stained hands.

Dani, crying as she shuts every open eye and promises not to ever let it be her that dies again, not to ever let it be _Grace_ that dies again. “Whatever you were to me then, you are to me now.” A soft kiss to the forehead and a caress of the cheek. “I love you so much.” A count of a thousand sorrys still wouldn’t be enough to close the wound that she now covers with a final slab of stone, a grave of concrete and iron.

She is sorry, _ again. _

Grace is not.


End file.
